’12 Years a Slave’ Highlights America’s Shocking Record of Female Subjugation

AFRICANGLOBE – Women did not exist at the dawn of colonial America. That is to say, from a legal perspective, they had no existence apart from their husband’s. They mostly couldn’t own property. They couldn’t inherit. Their babies did not belong to them, and neither did their bodies. They were chattel, much like a cow or a utensil.

Some of the first white women to set foot in Virginia were placed on auction blocks and sold for tobacco. Men paid the London Company for these “tobacco brides” and walked away with a combination s*xual partner/farm worker. Other colonial women —as many as 75 percent of the early Chesapeake white female population — came to America (sometimes through kidnapping) as indentured servants who performed rough work for masters who might prefer to see them die rather than pay them at the end of servitude. Indentured women could not marry, and were subject to s*xual exploitation.

Some colonial women, particularly in New England, were executed as witches, while others were tortured through public whippings or even the “scold’s bridle,” an iron mask developed during medieval times which featured a spike that prevented the wearer from speaking (it was later incorporated into slavery). Native American women, whom white men perceived to be s*xually available, were accordingly targeted for molestation and violence. In any conflict, rape was a strong possibility: During the Revolution, the Philadelphia City Council warned of British soldiers bent on raping wives and daughters.

The worst oppression of all was reserved for African women brought to the colonies on slave ships, where many suffered rape by sailors long before their arrival. On top of the gender and class biases already directed against women, they got hit with developing racial prejudice. The year 1662 turned their fate bitter for centuries to come when colonial slave law broke from English precedent and set forth that all children born to enslaved mothers would follow the condition of their mother regardless of paternity. This made the paternity of the women’s child legally irrelevant. Slavery could now pass from one generation to the next, and the de-emphasis on paternity threw open the door to rape. Breeding programs may have forced women to become pregnant by enslaved men, overseers, or slave owners.

As a country, we have not yet reckoned fully with this trauma. The experience of enslaved women has not drawn as much attention in the box office as that of their male counterparts, an exception being Beloved, based on Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which reveals the harrowing experience of motherhood under slavery.

The brutal separation of mothers from their children was something abolitionists could easily use to prick the consciences of Americans. But there were other horrors, just as ghastly, that could only be whispered about. 12 Years a Slave, a new film based on the narrative of Solomon Northup, a free Black abducted into slavery in 1841, gives us a glimpse of them.

Through his story, we meet Patsey, a favorite on the Louisiana plantation of Edwin Epps who is petted and rewarded with delicacies for her high spirits and pleasing personality. The proud, ebony-skinned girl grows up into a strong and agile young woman, preternaturally skilled in picking cotton.

But everything goes wrong for Patsey, through no fault of her own. She attracts the lustful eye of her captor, and with it, the jealous rage of her mistress. Between the two of them, they torment the girl to the point where she becomes a living shadow. In Northup’s biography, she sinks into depression, plagued with nightmares. In the film, her depression is dramatized as a desire for Pratt to end her life and thus her misery.

Pratt was the name given to Solomon Northup after he was lured from New York to Washington and then taken by kidnappers to Louisiana, possibly the most brutal scene of slavery in America. There, between innumerable whippings and near-fatal run-ins with his captor, he cut cane and picked cotton for a decade until he was rescued. 12 Years a Slave, a harrowing and unflinching look at life on a bayou plantation, is based on Northup’s account of the experience, written down David Wilson, a lawyer and New York state legislator.

The original narrative is a page-turner and presents Northup as an astute man who appreciates the complexity of human beings and the system that negatively impacted everyone involved, degrading the lives of the enslaved and the master alike. In Northup’s view, slavery contorted the characters of otherwise admirable human beings and fueled the harmful qualities of the worst. As Wilson interpreted his oral account, “There may be humane masters, as there certainly are inhuman ones—there may be slaves well-clothed, well-fed, and happy, as there surely are those half-clad, half-starved and miserable; nevertheless, the institution that tolerates such wrong and inhumanity as I have witnessed, is a cruel, unjust, and barbarous one.”

In the film version of 12 Years a Slave, the plantation mistress Mary Epps is bile and hatred incarnate. But Northup’s own narrative offers a more charitable — and psychologically nuanced — view of her, explaining that she was a woman of many excellent qualities who was unfortunately married to an abusive lout who could not, or would not, control his lewd instincts in the presence of a young Black woman whom he viewed as his property. Unable to convince her husband either to cease his s*xual pursuit of Patsey or sell her, Mary turns her anger upon her former favorite. Northup’s account shows how her anger turned to blinding rage:

“Mistress Epps was not naturally such an evil woman, after all. She was possessed of the devil, jealousy, it is true, but aside from that, there was much in her character to admire…She had been well educated at some institution this side the Mississippi; was beautiful, accomplished, and usually good-humored. She was kind to all of us but Patsey—frequently, in the absence of her husband, sending out to us some little dainty from her own table. In other situations—in a different society from that which exists on the shores of Bayou Boeuf, she would have been pronounced an elegant and fascinating woman. An ill wind it was that blew her into the arms of Epps.”

If it was an ill wind that blew Mary into the arms of Epps, it was a diabolical one that forced Patsey there. Aware of her value as a skilled worker and addicted to her s*xually, Epps will never consent to give Patsey up, but his guilt and desire to please his wife causes him to alternate caresses with beatings.

In Northup’s account, Mary and Edwin Epps eventually became bonded in an “infernal jubilee over the girl’s miseries,” including an incident where, after a visit to a neighboring plantation where Epps suspects her of s*xual involvement with the owner, Patsey is tied up naked and subjected to a near-fatal whipping, which Northup himself is forced to conduct. The depiction of this scene is among the most moving in the film: Northup is nearly torn apart by the tension between his compassion for the young woman and his knowledge that he must carry out his master’s orders.

Our last glimpse of Patsey in the film is a shot of her standing forlornly in the dust of the wagon that would carry Northup to freedom. There would be no freedom for her.

We are an organisation of people dedicated to the propagation and the dissemination of news and information relating to, and of importance to African Peoples worldwide. Our main objective is to provide an online portal where people of African decent; African heritage and friends of Africa can liaise and exchange knowledge and information.